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Moju Seeks To Be A Smarter Instagram

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A Series of Forbes Insights Profiles of Thought Leaders Changing the Business Landscape:  Mok Oh, Co-Founder and CEO, Moju.

From the original days of Kodak cameras to today’s Facebook, people have sought ways to capture the moments that matter in their lives.  “We want to disrupt that by thinking about it differently. Our big vision is to help people share and preserve their stories with people that matter to them,” says Mok Oh, co-founder and CEO of photo sharing app company Moju.

Digital cameras and smartphones are constantly recording everything we do in photos, videos, audio and texts.  The problem is not about capturing anymore. We have devices with us pretty much all the time that will capture all these things for us.

What about sharing? There is Facebook and a multitude of services to store content in the cloud. Editing and organization are also easily done with available applications. Oh believes that the one element in this process that has not changed is the consumption of the content.

We consume content that is the output of legacy devices. Cameras have been around for over 150 years.  Yet the way we capture it hasn't really changed and the way we consume them hasn't changed. You are still looking at one picture at a time. For video you still play and watch it linearly through time.

“I believed we could do better.  You listen to people's stories about running into burning houses to retrieve their photo albums because it’s really one of the most valued and sentimental items that they own.  But then in terms of consuming them, we ask ourselves, 'When was the last time you really went back and looked at your photos?' Even the ones on your smartphone. And mostly the answer is never. Yet as time goes by, this data becomes more and more valuable,” says Oh.

Oh believes the entire model is upside-down. It's not about the capture. It's not about organization. It's not even about sharing. It's really about something in the middle; something where you are consuming the content that's relevant to you now.

At Moju, they have tested this out with the users and people seem to love it. He claims there is a visceral reaction when you can control what you see; a happiness that bubbles up in people's faces and eyes.

Moju uses machine learning to summarize and look for patterns and then bring them back into the app users current feed. The more content you connect with the app’s functionality, the more it will automatically start creating stories. “We called it Moju Flashback and the first function we created was peer-to-peer communications called Moju Chat. So now we're starting to really flex our muscles with data science,” says Oh.

“We are data scientists. Our backend system looks for every picture that you have. We look for over 100 different features and then understand which of the those equate to happiness for you.”

Moju is an app that allows you to preserve and share stories that matter with people that matter. “We like to claim we're building a smarter Instagram,” says Oh.

Oh has only raised $1 million in seed money from Angel investors (one of which is Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin) thus far.

“We are a small group but I feel like there is enough traction and proof that we can sufficiently and easily go out and raise more venture capital,” says Oh.

Oh’s fascination with preserving and sharing personal histories is not surprising given his peripatetic upbringing.  He was born in Korea then moved to Singapore and spent much of his early life growing up in the Philippines.  "My father was a diplomat so we moved around quite a bit. I came to the U.S. for college.”

Oh went to Oberlin College in Ohio for Liberal Arts and majored in Computer Science, Studio Art and Art History.  “I think I might still be the only one in Oberlin College to combine those majors,” says Oh. He then went to the University of Pennsylvania for his PhD in Computer Science and was also working towards a Masters of Architecture. “I was trying to tie them together.  At that time, art and computer science were like water and oil.”

After completing his Masters in computer science, he decided not to pursue the PhD and took a position with Andersen Consulting. When Oh learned  that MIT had built an advance computer graphics lab, the PhD bug hit him again – after completing that program he decided teaching was not for him and began taking business classes at MIT Sloan.

After completing that program in 2002, he started a company called EveryScape. Bootstrapping that company for about a year and half, he eventually raised venture capital - around $30 million. The company was a combination of photos and big data. “We went around taking pictures of the world.  We were doing ‘Street View’ before there was a Street View," says Oh.

EveryScape is still going and profitable.

He was there for eight years, got restless and decided it was time to move on. Oh wound up joining a friend's start up called Where, Inc., which was later acquired by PayPal in 2011 for $135 million. PayPal’s President at the time, Scott Thompson, then convinced Oh to take on the newly created role of Chief Scientist at PayPal. Soon after Scott moved on to Yahoo.

With Oh’s mentor and friend Scott gone, Oh felt like the time was right to leave and start another company, which is now Moju.

“I left a lot of money on the table, but I feel alive every day. That's what matters more to me than anything.”

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